I ditched the laptop when I bought my first iPad and have never looked back.
Peter wrote:
Let me ask: who never travels with a laptop?
Me. EOM.
Clearly people differ in the tasks they need to do (or want to do) when travelling.
For typing short messages, a phone or a tablet is fine and this is what I do on short trips. But the (small) price I pay for being able to travel relatively freely and at short notice is that I need to be in contact with the office, do work emails (which cannot be written in pidgin English), do the EuroGA stuff (some of which is nontrivial in complexity), do trip writeups, including video editing and rendering, etc etc while travelling and most of this needs a proper keyboard and a decent screen. I also never found any decent apps for tablets which do all I need. Phone and tablet apps are of necessity heavily feature-crippled. I looked at using a bluetooth keyboard but by the time you are carrying that you might as well carry a lightweight laptop. I got through a Dell D400 (c. 2002-2008), Thinkpad X60s (2008-2013; a super little machine which we still use at work on test rigs), Thinkpad x230 (2013-2018; a quad core i7 machine which would outperform most desktops for video rendering), and now I have a Dell XPS13-9360. Each time, the previous laptop is maintained as a backup laptop so the x230 is my backup.
The XPS13 is super; it can run win10 only (due to Intel chipset driver limitations) but I put a win7 interface on it and run some specialised apps under a winXP VMware VM. However I doubt its keyboard will outlast the x230’s – we have some test rigs on which the Thinkpads had specific keys pressed about 30k times and they are still going 
This is what I bring:
Within Europe:
- iPhone X, running AeroPlus Flightplan, Weather and SkyDemon
- iPad Pro running SD (mostly as backup, so stays in flight bag)
- Garmin Glo (GPS signal to iPad and iPhone X
- Garmin Inreach Tracker
Additionally In Africa:
- Iridium Go! for in-flight weather, tracking and communications, remote flight plan filing, etc.
- Goals Zero powerpack with solar panels for charging in remote places
- Survival equipment
- Stuff to secure aircraft in the bush such as axe and electric fence (to protect against hyenas damaging my plane).
Peter wrote:
Let me ask: who never travels with a laptop?
Do you mean for flight planning/management purposes? I never do.
(But I may of course bring a laptop because of the purpose of my trip.)
Yes that is a very fair distinction.
It probably depends on how much faith you put into one flight planning method. With the modern tools, particularly if IFR, one could do everything with just a phone and that has been doable for some years. Until something goes wrong…
Peter wrote:
It probably depends on how much faith you put into one flight planning method. With the modern tools, particularly if IFR, one could do everything with just a phone and that has been doable for some years. Until something goes wrong…
I use a tablet with the phone as backup.
iPad mini 4 LTE on a RAM mount with SD running
iPhone as SD backup (AirDrop the flight plan before departure) + for pictures
Charger for the cig-lighter (2 USB cable to the iThings above)
PowerFLARM portable on the glareshield
Powerbank
Flashlight (white only)
Headlamp (white + red)
A bunch of chargers for the above.
Resuscitating this thread in order to minimize drift on the scooter thread
My guess is that the electronic paraphernalia one is carrying on GA flights is increasing, along with some associated risks of sudden ignition, fire, smoke… still, it becomes almost impossible to escape having any kind of battery on board…
A shortlist of my batteries, asterisk for the ones I consider as dangerous:
Did I miss any? Not sure 
Now, it could pay big time to work out a strategy if one of those battery were to catch fire 🔥
At the risk of scratching similar threads, mine is A/open my O2 and don my mask, and B/initiate an emergency descent, with all the relevant items covered…
Dan wrote:
Flashlight *
Why flashlight? Do you use rechargable lithium batteries in the flashlight?
